Open Stack

On 2018-08-03 16:41:57 +0100 (+0100), Adam Spiers wrote:
[...]
> Another possibility would be to offer "open clinic" office hours,
> like the TC and other projects have done.  If the TC or anyone
> else has established best practices in this space, it'd be great
> to hear them.
[...]

First and foremost, office hours shouldn't be about constraining
when and where fruitful conversation can occur. Make sure people
with a common interest in the topic know where to find each other
for discussion at whatever times they happen to be available. When
you have that, "office hours" are simply a means of coordinating and
publicizing specific times when an increased number of participants
expect to be around. This is especially useful for having
consensus-building discussions more quickly than can be done
asynchronously through people responding to comments they see in
scrollback/logs or on mailing list threads.

Some options I've seen toyed with:

Using the meetbot to provide minutes of an office hour session...
this tends to result in making the session feel a lot more formal
and meeting-like, causing people to withhold conversation until the
appointed hour (avoiding bringing things up earlier); also having a
hard stop curtails continued discussion out of concern those
comments won't make it into the meeting log. An alternative is to
merely annotate discussion with some consistent tags so that they
can be easily found in the channel log later, though this depends on
people remembering to do that and also probably isn't much use
unless you intend to build/publish retrospective summaries. The lack
of a dedicated log for office hour discussions isn't a significant
loss, since our HTML-based IRC log viewer site has the ability to
deep-link to the time where you started the discussion anyway.

Producing an agenda for the office hour in advance... much like
using the meetbot, this has the effect of making things feel a lot
more formal and dissuades participants from bringing up topics not
covered by the agenda or allowing discussion to evolve organically
from topic to topic. On the other hand, if you find that you have
people showing up at office hour with nothing to talk about and that
worries you (occasional dead office hours might be fine for some
groups and not others), you can attempt to prepare a list of
possible conversation starters to give people something to talk
about for long enough to prompt them to continue on to other topics
as they come to mind. Continuing discussion from recent mailing list
threads, relevant code reviews, important bug reports or interesting
presentations might be good candidates for this.

Declaring multiple office hours at different times to increase
participation from subgroups in a variety of timezones/regions...
this might work depending on the group and topics, but you're just
as likely to find that some of those times are consistently not
well-attended while others are where a bulk of the discussions take
place. If this is a model you're considering, you may find you need
to move the consistently dead hours around or condense some; or you
could accept that some of your designated office hours are just
rarely used as long as that's not a huge time-waster for the handful
of people who do show up for them only to find there's not much
going on.

Hope this helps!
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 963 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-sigs/attachments/20180803/465741ac/attachment.sig>